1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a sporting article, and more particularly to a shuttlecock.
2. Description of Related Arts
Conventional shuttlecock involves hand-made manufacturing process in which natural feather is planted onto a cock, a bottom portion is coated with glue which is then heated and dried, and a stem of the feather is twined with double threads, applied with a layer of glue and secured in position after heating and drying. The drawbacks for this kind of conventional shuttlecock are as follows:
First, the entire process requires about 20 days and a number of steps that is time consuming and labor intensive. Thus, the cost of labor is high.
Second, the natural feather has great variation in shape. The weight, the angle of the tapered end of the shaft, and the thickness of each particular feature are different from each other, so that their centers of mass cannot be made overlappedly and concentrically. Therefore, it is very difficult to make a shuttlecock that has a curvature complementary to its thickness.
Third, the process of manufacture of the conventional shuttlecock, which is a hand-made process, is hard to be standardized under a strict and universal standard in which the gap between two tapered ends of any two particular feathers is not standardized and the thread level is not strictly parallel. The shuttlecock as produced has low consistence and the quality cannot be controlled that the technical functionality of the shuttlecock is adversely affected.